


It's 5 AM, Mikey

by Screamless



Category: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Cartoon 2018)
Genre: ADHD, Autism, Autistic Donnie, Mikey Has ADHD, if only i had a brother that tricked me into sleeping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25240270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Screamless/pseuds/Screamless
Summary: Donnie knows the drill by this point. Whenever Mikey gets a new hyper-fixation, he doesn't sleep, and when he doesn't sleep, there's only one solution: trickery.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 134





	It's 5 AM, Mikey

**Author's Note:**

> Another contribution to the “ADHD Mikey and autistic Donnie” headcanon because I’m autistic, my little brother has ADHD, and that fact makes it just too easy to write these things. Based on an interaction I had with him last week (he wanted to discuss the ethics of cannibalism??? He’s eleven??? He did make good points tho)

At 5 AM in the morning, Donnie’s eyes are open and there’s no going back. The past week has been sleepless, too many ideas running around in his head, but that’s typical and that’s fine. Little time is wasted as he grabs a mask, a marker, and a metal shell (the lighter alloy, he’s not in the mood for heavy-lifting today) and makes his way to the bathroom.

There’s something on the door. Fighting a yawn, he squints his eyes trying to decipher it without his contacts. Fortunately, it comes in big, bold letters, reading, “Hero inside! (Check above the sink).”

Well, he can play along. He walks over to see what was why by the sink, and lo and behold, there is nothing but his own reflection in the mirror. Right, because he is the hero. Cute.

With a snort, Donnie finishes his business in the bathroom (and maybe spends a minute or two more than necessary checking for eyebrow smudges) and goes to leave. The bathroom door sticks, so he has to add a bit of shoulder and lift to get it open. That, and it’s five in the morning so he didn’t bother turning on any lights.

So forgive him if his voice comes out much more undignified than it should when he finds a lurking figure standing two inches from the door. 

“GAH--oh hi Mikey.”

“Hi Donnie! Did you see my sign? I put it there last night. Do you get it? ‘Cause we’re heroes!”

“Is that why you decided to creep outside the bathroom? So you could scare me into an early grave?”

“Yep!”

Shaking his head, he slides around his younger brother and makes his way into the kitchen for some coffee and whatever leftovers aren’t too greasy to be repurposed as breakfast food. 

“So,” he says as he reaches into the fridge, because he _knows_ Mikey is still there, “What are you doing up this early?” 

“Oh, I didn’t sleep,” comes the cheerful reply. “I was too busy playing that new game! I wanted to go to sleep at midnight, so I thought ten more minutes, then I looked over again and it was three in the morning! But I was just getting to a good part, so I thought five more minutes, and then I looked over again and it was five!”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“Not even a little!”

“Uh-huh...so what’s this game about again?” 

“Ok, so you start out in a plane and there’s all these pretty lights in the sky but they’re actually deadly and make you crash into this mountain, and I think I’m trying to find my ex-wife? Anyway I get a piece of metal stuck in my hand which was super gross but then I meet a _wolf_ \--”

As Mikey talks, Donnie dumps shredded chicken and olives onto an old piece of pizza, rolls it up, pops the whole thing into his mouth and gurgles it down with some instant coffee (he’s been told swallowing things whole is disturbing so he at least pretends he needs to wash it down), and ambles back to his own room, making a series of ‘mhm’ and ‘really?’ sounds as Mikey, predictably, follows him in. 

The purple turtle presses a button on his wrist-tech and the loft bed shifts down the wall with a clunk and whir until it sits at a comfortable, low height. He points at the bed-- “Your spot,” --then at a chair in the corner of his room. “My spot.”

“Huh? Oh, sure.” The box turtle happily obliges and crawls into his brother’s bed. 

Settling into his chair with his laptop and a cup perched on his knee, he makes mild noises of affirmation as Mikey rambles about his newest hyperfixation. As an afterthought, he turns on the dim lighting feature and lets the whole room fall under an indigo haze. 

Mikey continues. “--So after the grandma tried to shoot me I had to get cans of dog food so she could survive the winter. I didn’t even know humans could eat dog food. Like, isn’t it for dogs?” He wiggles down the bed and pulls the covers up, fitting his hands under his head. “Then I wondered if there was such a thing as turtle food and I had to pause so I could look it up and guess what--it can come in _cans_. It looks like cat food and sometimes fish food. So of course I ordered some ‘cause I gotta find out what it tastes like--”

Donnie pauses his typing for a second because _what_ but says nothing. Instead, he hits play, letting soft, slow music float from his speakers, accompanied by sounds of nature and the gentle clacking of his keyboard. “You mind? It's study music.”

“Nah, you’re fine. So back to the food. I get to wondering, what if I don’t like the turtle food and it goes to waste?”

“You do hate to waste food.”

“It’s just not right. Then I thought, what if we got a pet turtle to eat the rest of it? Like, would that be weird? I mean we’re both turtles, it’s one of us and not one of us at the same time. I’m like, is that even ethical? I know what ethical means by the way.”

“Good for you. And I would be more than willing to discuss the ethics of keeping pets while technically being animals ourselves, but I have to focus on this bit real quick.”

“Coding?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, that’s fine.” The box turtle wiggles some more and drops his knee pads, sash, and mask onto the floor. “You mind if I leave those there for a bit?”

Donnie shrugs. “Sure. Just clean them up later.”

Nodding, Mikey curls up under the blanket, watching his brother type away, illuminated in the faint lavender glow of his computer and the deep indigo of his bedroom, listening to wind chimes and ocean waves, and waiting until he can talk again.

The kid’s snoring within five minutes.

With a huff, Donnie shuts his laptop and stretches, stifling a yawn so as not to wake his sleep-deprived brother. Not exactly how he had wanted to start out his day, but hey, he can make sacrifices too. He’s not _entirely_ self-centered. That bit of code needed some reworking anyway. 

Now, he could get some real work done.

Or...

He opens the laptop again and pulls up a search engine.

_‘box turtle dietary needs’_

**Author's Note:**

> I think it’s funny when kids get tired they get more hyper. Also I learned the indigo lighting helps with sleep from a video about a dog being cured of its recurring night terrors. It was very informative. My brother did the “hero, look above the sink!” thing and it was ADORABLE. He’s such a sweet kid.
> 
> Because I'm sleep-deprived myself and I want to, here’s a list of how I think ND traits showed up here and what I tried to make clear while writing.
> 
> Mikey’s ADHD:  
> Difficulty tracking passage of time - “then it was midnight, then it was three AM, then it was five!”  
> Difficulty transitioning to different task - too many tasks between “play game” and “be in bed” to make that happen on his own  
> Hyperfixation - he loves this game so much he can’t stop playing it, talking about it, and thinking about it  
> Info-dumping - overexplaining, including his entire thought process that led up to a point
> 
> Donnie’s autism (not as evident because I was focusing on Mikey):  
> Routine - get up, get mask, marker, and shell first thing after waking  
> Blunt communication - “your spot” “my spot” Mikey is used to this, which is why he doesn’t suspect Donnie is actually being sneaky about getting him to sleep.


End file.
